Last time, we were talking about Ruby Duncan, who died recently at age 93. In the late 1960s, she found herself on welfare. And she and other Black women found the system worked against them. Administrators looked down on them and cut their income. Case workers would check their homes in the middle of the night, waking and scaring them and their children.
Eventually, word spread through West Las Vegas about the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization, part of a national group. Women began attending, including Duncan. She later said, “I didn’t know what a legislature was.” She soon found out. She became the head of the local organization. She and other women from West Las Vegas lobbied the legislature and spoke on the statehouse steps. She carefully studied newspapers and judicial opinions. In 1969, she was elected to the National Welfare Rights Organization National Coordinating Committee.
Duncan and the other women of West Las Vegas worked hard. They kept up a drumbeat in the media—especially when federal officials required welfare mothers to enter job training programs, the state of Nevada eliminated those very programs, and my colleagues in the legislature refused to bring them back. She and eight other women led the first Las Vegas sit-in, at the state welfare office, and were arrested.
Duncan and her allies turned to Clark County Legal Services and two new attorneys there, Mahlon Brown the third and Jack Anderson. When they went to court to seek to restore benefits, Judge Roger D. Foley issued a temporary restraining order while the case was going on, and instead state and local officials slow-walked everything. Duncan and other Westside mothers as well as religious and women’s groups went before the Clark County Commission and got them to change how food was distributed so that West Las Vegas children wouldn’t starve.
The fight continued when newly elected governor Mike O’Callaghan kept the same people in charge of the state welfare department. More than 100 lawyers and students came to town to help Brown and Anderson go to court. Duncan and her allies, including longtime Nevada activist and philanthropist Maya Miller, spoke with national welfare rights leaders about a march down the Strip. On March 6, 1971, welfare rights activists gathered in front of the Circus Circus and marched down the Strip to Caesars Palace, with Duncan in front with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Actress and activist Jane Fonda walked behind her. The next week, they went into the Sands, and police arrested eighty-six marchers. Later, violence broke out at the welfare office when the manager locked the doors and hid from them.
The welfare rights activists both won and lost. They won their case against the state to restore benefits, but the state dragged its heels. A federal study showed the state welfare office heavily exaggerated the number of welfare recipients they claimed were being paid under false pretenses. Duncan and her allies got a lot of attention for their cause, including in Duncan’s new column in the Las Vegas Voice, the Black community’s newspaper.
